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Imagining Publics is an extended public projection series that will take shape as a sequence of five ephemeral video installations, each occurring at different sites within Ottawa, beginning in mid-July and concluding in late October. In conversation with SAW Video’s curatorial staff, five local commissioned artists have each selected specific sites and surfaces to host their newly created video projections. Each of these special projects implicates or acknowledges the preexisting architectures, dynamics, and histories of the sites that surround the edges of their frame.
Varied in both form and content, the works are linked by the artists’ ‘imagining’ of public viewing as a transitory and fleeting moment of encounter. In these outdoor locations, the tactics of immersion, narrative, proximity and control, inherent to moving image presentation within the gallery or theatrical setting, have had to be modified or abandoned. In their place, the artists have developed compositional and editing strategies that generate density, compression, seduction, fluidity or ambience, producing modes of imagistic address that make use of the attention offered within the span of a passing glance. Through this conjuring of curiosity and ultimately commitment, these works invite the public to gather around a sequence of illuminated surfaces, to peel back the layers of facades, and engage in an act of collective imagining.
For more information and documentation of this program: https://www.sawvideo.com/knot/projections/knot-projections-2019